The swifts are gone

Stood in the garden this evening waiting for the usual screaming party over the rooftops, the one that's been there every warm evening since May, and realised slowly that it's been at least a week since I actually saw one. Not a dramatic departure, no last big gathering to mark the occasion — they just thin out day by day until one evening you notice the sky is doing something different and can't immediately say what.

They always leave earlier than feels right. It's still properly summer by any reasonable measure — warm evenings, midges still out, nothing else has packed up yet — but swifts run on their own calendar entirely, tied to insect abundance somewhere over the Channel rather than anything happening here. By the time the rest of the garden birds are still mid-moult and keeping their heads down, the swifts have already committed to Africa.

I mentioned it to a neighbour who does the school run past the same rooftops every morning and she hadn't noticed at all, which is fair — you only really clock the gap if you'd been listening for the noise in the first place. Made a note of the date this time. Last year I only worked out roughly when they'd gone by looking back through old messages.